Now you can capture Order IDs to mitigate double-conversion counting in AdWords

If a customer converts from an AdWords ad and revisits the confirmation page to find information about their order, you definitely don’t want that page load getting counted as a new conversion. Now, order IDs can be used to help ensure a conversion isn’t counted more than once.

Tuesday, it was announced that advertisers now can edit their conversion tags to capture an order ID, such as a confirmation number, order number and so on. When a customer revisits that conversion page from the same device they converted on, AdWords will filter out the duplicate.

There are a few things you’ll have to do get this going:

1. Set up an AdWords conversion tracking tag. This kind of goes without saying, but you will need to set up a conversion action and have the conversion tag placed on your website to have anything to de-dupe in the first place.
2. Capture some type of ID with your conversions. You’ll need to capture an order number or some kind of unique identifier when a user completes a transaction. Numbers, letters, dashes and spaces are all acceptable — up to 64 characters — as long as you’re not pulling in any info that could be used to identify a customer, like a last name.
3. Be able to add code to the AdWords conversion tracking tag. The code is what inserts the order ID in the conversion tracking. If you’re not a developer, you’ll probably want to ask one to help you out at this stage.

The instructions for adding the code to the conversion tracking tag are available on this AdWords support page.

About The Author

Ginny Marvin

As Third Door Media's paid media reporter, Ginny Marvin writes about paid online marketing topics including paid search, paid social, display and retargeting for Search Engine Land and Marketing Land. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, Ginny has held both in-house and agency management positions. She provides search marketing and demand generation advice for ecommerce companies and can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.